Most Organizations Have Plenty of Unused Storage Capacity

Press release from Networkworld (online component of Computerworld magazine)
July 7, 2010 | COMMENTS

A survey of 1,165 IT managers found that the average company doesn't use 28% of its storage capacity. Even so, they plan to increase storage capacity by 34% over the next year.

The survey, performed by the International Data Group and published in the July issue of Computerworld, found that the storage capacity at the surveyed companies will grow by an average of 58% over the next one to three years and by 93% over the next three to five years.

The survey separated respondents into two groups: Those managing IT in enterprises with more than 1,000 employees and those at businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees.

The enterprise survey found that 58% of respondents work at a company with a storage budget of more than $100,000, while the IT managers at smaller companies say they spend less than $100,000 annually on storage needs.

The survey found that companies spend an average of 23% of their annual storage budget on operating costs and maintenance. The enterprise users said their companies spend about 29% of their annual storage budgets on maintenance and operating costs, while the smaller companies spend 19%.

Overall, the managers indicated that their top challenges are infrastructure complexity (28%), security concerns (27%), inadequate skills or training (25%), difficulty proving ROI (21%) and deciding which storage areas to virtualize (21%).

Only 14% of respondents said their companies are piloting or implementing private or public cloud-based storage technologies. If cloud technologies are used, the respondents said they would likely be in the form of private cloud systems.

About 42% of all respondents said that public cloud-based data storage solutions are not on their roadmap at all. Meanwhile, only 23% of enterprise IT managers and 23% of their small-business colleagues ruled out the use of private cloud-based data storage solutions.

When asked if they're currently taking or planning to take actions to monitor storage utilization rates or consolidate their storage onto fewer systems, most said they are. Eighty-eight percent of enterprise IT managers, and 73% of small-business respondents said they planned to monitor storage utilization rates.

Meanwhile, 65% of all respondents said they plan to consolidate storage operations by using fewer, more homogeneous systems over the next year.

The survey also found that enterprise IT managers are far more likely than managers of smaller organizations to increase the level of data center automation as a way of improving storage efficiency—by 79% versus 56%.